Cybersecurity spending trends, 2020

Spending is up, but perhaps not in the most needed areas, increased business leader involvement brings new challenges, while vertical industries have different requirements and priorities.

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It’s still early in the year so it’s worth posing some important questions: Will organizations increase their cybersecurity budgets in 2020? If so, what are their requirements and investment priorities?

ESG recently published its annual IT spending intentions research for 2020. The research can help answer these and other questions. For example:

55% of organizations will increase overall IT spending in 2020. At least half of organizations in the health care, technology, retail/wholesale, manufacturing, and business services industries will increase IT spending in 2020.

When asked for justifications for increasing IT spending, 36% of survey participants responded that their organization wanted to improve security and cyber risk management. This should mean that security is baked into every IT decision, but that’s not my experience.

62% of organizations will increase cybersecurity spending in 2020, while another 36% will keep cybersecurity budgets flat. Technology organizations are most likely to increase spending (73%), followed by manufacturing (68%), and retail/wholesale (67%).